Why drinking 52% vodka at a Croatian Festival is a bad bad idea

We all know the feeling- on holiday, a bit strapped for cash, don't really understand the labels on food and drink in the shop, so we just get anything and hope its ok. In this case, it was a plastic bottle of spirit with a picture of a man holding an umbrella on the front and text stating that it contained "52% ALCOHOL"

We decided that an English bottle of vodka was 40% anyway, so what difference would an extra 12% be? Turns out a lot.

For starters, it was exactly how I'd imagined bleach to taste. Even a few drops of it in a glassful of coke burned my mouth. It felt as though my intestines were on fire. But I continued to drink it to avoid having to pay for drinks in the festival arena and thinking - I must get used to it after a while?

I suppose that was true, because I managed to drink enough to get drunk. But not a normal drunk. How I wish it was a normal drunk. One minute, I was dancing at the beach party without a care in the world, the next I woke up in a tent that ponged of vomit.

So, not only had I threw up all over my tent, but there was another slight technical difficulty- I couldn't move my arm. At all. I would try to raise it, and it just wouldn't go. If I lifted it with my other arm, it would zip straight back down to my side as soon as I let it go. Not ideal on the first day of a festival, eh?

I went to the first aid tent and they confirmed it wasn't broken or fractured and gave me a sling. And somehow I did the whole festival arm in sling. It meant I couldn't fist pump or get on anybody's shoulders but I think doing four nights out with it in that condition was a massive achievement.

Back in the uk, I was told I'd pulled my shoulder out of its socket, that my sling was only really hindering me and to do daily exercises to improve it, and it did manage to recover speedily. And I still managed to do the half marathon I planned on doing a couple of weeks later.

Life lesson- while it is always good to try new things when abroad and in daily life, when said 'new thing' is a bottle filled with a liquid that is more alcohol than not it probably is a good idea to give it a miss. Then you can avoid really attractive photos such as this: